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Sun releases developer tools for NetBeans

Two new packs for the open-source NetBeans IDE aim to make it easier to work on applications for the Web and for a range of OSes.

Candace Lombardi
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET.
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Candace Lombardi
Sun Microsystems announced the availability of two new sets of developer tools for NetBeans IDE on Wednesday.

The NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) is a free, open-source environment that lets developers create cross-platform software applications for the desktop, the Web, the enterprise or mobile devices.

The first new kit, the NetBeans C/C++ Development Pack, allows people to work with the NetBeans IDE in developing C and C++ applications for the Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems, Sun said.

The second, the NetBeans Visual Web Pack 5.5, is a new set of tools for developing Web applications and binding those applications to data sources. A Data Provider API (application programming interface) includes drag-and-drop features for managing data binding. It also lets programmers create Web applications with AJAX-enabled JavaServer Faces components.

The Web pack also allows developed applications to be packaged and used with standard Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) application servers such as JBoss, IBM's WebSphere and Tomcat.

Sun expanded the NetBeans developer tools to include the C and C++ programming languages in March, and added support for Java EE 5 in October with its NetBeans 5.5 update. The March change was an indirect response to programmers' complaints that NetBeans was not up to par with Eclipse, an IBM open-source project that already supported C and C++.